Great news for fans of England v New Zealand matches – today’s Twenty20 match was the first of 19 consecutive international fixtures between the two sides.

Surely what everyone’s hoping is that one team gets on top early on and shows itself to be vastly superior to the other team. Then we’ll all get to delight in watching two mismatched teams going through the motions a dozen or more times in succession.

Andrew Strauss scored a hundred against New Zealand on his debut, but he’s been out of form recently. Maybe he can get a few runs against Chris Martin and Kyle Mills. Maybe he’ll rack up the hundreds and cement his place back in the team, having proved to the world that he can score bucketloads of runs against Chris Martin and Kyle Mills. Then he can face Dale Steyn.

We’re not belittling Chris Martin and Kyle Mills per se. We’re just saying that it’s quite a long stretch against one team if you happen to take a liking to their bowling and it might skew statistics and opinion accordingly. He could just as easily have a real problem facing Daniel Vettori and find himself finished.